Global capitalism

Mutatis mutandis

TIP O'NEILL, the late great Democratic speaker of America's House of Representatives, famously said that “all politics is local”. Not in the mind of George Monbiot, a British journalist and campaigner for something he calls global justice. Mr Monbiot thinks all real politics is global, for it is at a global level that the rich (principally America) impose the rules that keep the rest of the world in grinding poverty, using the evil IMF to impose huge debts on them and exploiting unfair trade rules to plunder their economies, in a “global dictatorship of vested interests”. All is not lost, however, for the dictatorship has created the seeds of its own destruction. It has laid the way towards what Mr Monbiot hopes will be a global revolution, to bring about a global parliament, which would use the voting power of the poor masses to overturn the hegemony of the rich.

That is a toned-down summary of his ingenious plan. He lays it out in a series of what he calls “repulsive proposals”, a term he naturally uses to mean the opposite: he thinks his ideas are so attractively radical that they will be adopted by the world's people in something he calls a “metaphysical mutation”. It is a sort of philosophical revelation, a change of consciousness that, once begun, takes on an irresistible logic all of its own. Central to it is the idea that poor people everywhere share interests that span borders and cultures. So if you had a world parliament in which everyone's vote counted equally they would vote not for narrow nationalisms, as Chinese or Americans, but for what really matters in shaking off the yoke of debt, saving the environment and “curtailing the world-eating and mathematically impossible system we call capitalism”.

Aware of the mathematically possible, you may by now be wondering how it is that a billion Chinese, say, will be able to take part in this given that at a local level they live in a dictatorship. Mr Monbiot has an answer: voting powers, whether in the parliament or in his proposed democratic replacement for the United Nations Security Council, will be weighted according to whether countries are democracies at home. Thus China will have a powerful incentive to democratise, so as to be able to carry its full weight in world affairs.

Aware of the politically possible, you may be wondering how this is to be brought about. Mr Monbiot describes today's world (and that of the past 500 years) as an Age of Coercion, to be replaced by an Age of Consent. But, of course, to bring about such change would require coercion, to overthrow the current system, which includes the Chinese communist dictatorship along with others. Not, you understand, the sort of coercion used by George Bush in overturning Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, for that was outrageously in violation of international law and public opinion.

So in Mr Monbiot's world, mass-murdering dictatorships would be protected when public opinion would rather they be left alone? Well, yes. But in Mr Monbiot's world, poverty would be eliminated by a new “international clearing union” under which countries running trade surpluses (watch out, China) would be fined and the money handed to poor ones running trade deficits; farm and textile trade would be free yet all other trade would be highly regulated, with infant-industry protection encouraged for the poor. In such a world there wouldn't need to be third-world dictators such as Mr Hussein, so presumably they would disappear.

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The difficulty in arguing with this view lies in working out where to start. With the fact that, in this age of coercion, the proportion of the world's population living in democracies has actually risen? Or that at this time when the rich grind their heels in the faces of the poor there has actually been a dramatic fall in world poverty, with the proportion of the world's population living on less than $2 a day halving in the past 20 years? And that this has been achieved because more and more countries have adopted a more market-oriented system for the impossible world-eater, capitalism? Or that even if there was a world parliament it would be beset by the same worries about national sovereignty and interests that lead British public opinion to be so sceptical of the European Union?

In the end, though, the argument is impossible. Mr Monbiot works in a different language, with a different set of “facts” and altogether on a different metaphysical plane from the rest of us. For he has gone through the mutation.